It's safe to say that you won't find many films more distasteful, misanthropic and deliriously odd as Gerard Damiano's puppet porno Let My Puppets Come. The erstwhile director of Deep Throat and other, more classy hardcore epics here delivers a side-swipe at, well... just about everything: film-making, pornography, sex, capitalism and the American dream, in the shape of the most degenerate puppet show you'll ever see.
The film begins with Damiano himself at a hot dog stand, buying a dog and surprised at being joined by a small puppet who buys the same snack for himself. We then discover that this puppet is a gopher in an on-the-rocks business that owes money to a mysterious "Mr Big". The gopher arrives back at the office to find the puppet suits in an uproar - they need to make a hefty sum of money quick, otherwise they're for the chop. They decide to make a porno.
The gopher pitches a couple of ideas, and we see them enacted by puppets before us: one has a woman poked by her pet dog, the other a patient blown by a nurse. It is somewhat disconcerting to see puppets, with foam-made sexual organs, explicitly engaging in sexual intercourse, and it is in this queasy sight that the film's peculiar ability to arouse unease arises: human sexuality is debased to mere puppetry, organs are no more than sown on (and on one occasion sliced off) appendages, volition is reduced to being moved around by some unseen person with their hand up your ass.
Soon the suits have recruited a relative of their eldest member, one Gepetto, as creative consultant on the movie; he arrives with his son Pinocchio - as soon as you see the boy's nose you know where it's going to end up. The filming begins, with a puppet leather man called Lash whipping the performers and instructing them with shouts and abuse. Musical numbers are filmed, including a jaw-dropping tribute to the All American Dream Girl sung by a prick and danced by a a torso with chicken legs, a c**t with jaws and breasts but no head. Rarely can the idea of the American dream have been so ridiculed, cheapened and disgraced.
There follows an interlude in which one of the backers goes to a bar to get away from sexual organs, but find a (real) woman dancing lewdly. He rescues her from a drunk and finds himself back at her place. She wants to reward him, so he takes her underwear. What this little piece of random insanity might portend is anyone's guess, but the interaction between the live humans and the puppets is unnerving.
Back on set, the filmmakers need more in the film, so they make some sexualised adverts. These feature real porn actresses with puppets, and conjure up an image of the commercial world which is beyond cheap and tawdry, but which resolutely drags the Capitalist idea that "sex sells" through the dirtiest of dirt. One example of the jingles, this for a vaginal deodorant: "Use Miss Sweet Fish every day / Keeps Miss Skanky c**t away".
Mr Big arrives at the set, played by a human dwarf, threatening to kill them all because they haven't got his money. He is placated by a blow-job from a puppet. Then the cops arrive and arrest them all for making an indecent film, but they get off because a "pansy judge" has found the film to have "social redeeming value." "Social redeeming value my ass," mutters the cop, "f**cking is f**cking." The film goes on to win the best picture Oscar - presented for some reason by Damiano - and Variety is abuzz with the gossip about the puppet porno and its makers.
All of this amounts to a really freakish assault, in the end, on human dignity. We're all merely puppets, in our careers and sex lives, moved around by the demands of making money. Lord knows whether Damiano meant this as the desperate satire it now seems - it certainly is a porno comedy which leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth.
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